The present invention relates to a novel method for simultaneously detecting hybridization reactions and immunoreactions, and also to its use in therapeutic and industrial diagnosis and in the identification and/or quantification of biological molecules.
The diagnosis or the monitoring of pathologies most commonly requires hybridization detections and/or immunodetections. Thus, in the case of AIDS diagnosis, it may be necessary to investigate both the presence of the p24 protein, of the anti-viral envelope protein antibody and of the viral RNA, or of anti-p24 protein antibody and of the viral RNA.
The simultaneous detection of the hybridization reactions and immunoreactions under the same operating conditions and in the same reaction medium would make it possible to facilitate the diagnosis of pathologies requiring such a double detection.
The detection of the immunoreactions and of hybridization reactions using common parameters has already been studied in the prior art.
Thus, patent application WO 01/86296 describes a method designed for the simultaneous detection of a large number of analytes using a panel of markers specific for each analyte. However, this method does not describe the simultaneous detection both of hybridization reactions and of immunoreactions, and uses operating conditions for visualization that are different for each marker specific for each analyte.
Patent application WO 01/61040 also describes a method for simultaneously detecting analytes using semiconducting nanocrystals as detection markers. The reading of the hybridization reactions or immunoreactions is carried out by means of the variation in wavelength for the reading. However, the disadvantage of this method is that the sample to be analyzed must be divided up into several samples, such that each analyte to be studied is subjected to different operating conditions.
The methods of the prior art therefore have the drawbacks that simultaneous detection of hybridization reactions and of immunoreactions cannot take place under the same operating conditions and in the same reaction medium, such that the simultaneous detection is complex and expensive.